film | What's the opposite of joystick?

Watching STAY ALIVE, a witless chunk of horror-flick nonsense about a malevolent video game that literally kills its players at the moment a grisly death befalls their pixelated counterparts, you'll kinda picture director/co-writer William Brent Bell blabbing to Fangoria something like how his movie is really a comment on the Playstation dependency of today's zombified youth culture. Uh-huh. Sure. If his next film is called Bloody List, and it's a thriller in which a sentient IM program knocks off a troupe of photogenic chat-roomers, and he claims it's truly a parable about the dangers of anonymous online communication, my eyes are gonna roll right outta my head and down the multiplex aisle.

But I digress. Stay Alive is bad — really really really bad. How really really really bad? Well, in no particular order, it features: A) characters named Hutch, Swink, Abigail, Phineas and October, yet it's not adapted from a Dickens novel; B) Malcolm in the Middle's Frankie Muniz as a geeky techno-whiz who wears a backwards poker cap and swears in excitable South Park-ian dudespeak ("Goddamn sweet!"), which means he can't get turned into an Agent-Cody-Banks-kabob soon enough; C) a campy cameo by Alice Krige, Star Trek's borg queen, as an occult expert with an Elmer-Fudd-goes-to-the-bayou accent that turns a solemn expository monologue into a phonetical howler (according to her, the mystowee behind the carnage is linked to the evil spirit of a wesewected murderess); and D) what might be the worst scary-movie demise ever — a hit-and-run by a phantom horse-drawn carriage.

And then there's the ridiculous finale, in which the convoluted rules for survival Stay Alive previously established are shoved out the window as our intrepid heroes (A Door in the Floor's Jon Foster and The OC's Samaire Armstrong) defeat a mob of herky-jerky girl ghosts from The Ring or The Grudge or whatever other spooky Japanese import is hot right now — it's getting old, Hollywood — by pelting them with magical roses. Yep, magical roses. Insert your own game-over pun here. D-